Can you crack the world's hardest Sudoku puzzle?

Concentration, memory and focus can all be improved by training your brain, as World Memory Champion Dominic O’Brien discovered. Challenge your brain with the world's hardest Sudoku!

Dominic O’Brien suffered from both Dyslexia and Attention Deficit Disorder as a child and was all in all an average student, it wasn't until adulthood that he decided to train his brain, with staggering results.

Your brain is like any other muscle in your body, train it and it will become stronger and faster. At least, that's what Dominic discovered when he set about improving his levels of concentration, focus and memory. Now 50, Dominic has been crowned World Memory Champion eight times. Here's his top three techniques for memory...

The Link Method

Memory works by association. Get into the habit of making links between information. For example, bacon is Speck in German. To make a link, picture a slice of bacon with an unsavoury-looking speck on it.

Acronyms

Use extended acronyms to remember a series of data by creating a fun sentence. E.g. “My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets” gives you the order of the planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

Mental Pictures

Turn complicated data such as facts and figures into pictures. Arctic or Antarctic? If you think of looking up at an arch and down at an ant you’ll never confuse the two again.

Daily Training

So you could buy a Nintendo DS and get 'brain trainer' or you could use the old fashioned (sensible) way, with Sudoku! Finland based mathematician, Arto Inkala, has created a Sudoku puzzle to rival his World’s Hardest ‘Al Escargot’ puzzle which he produced in 2006.

Scientists have attributed our superior brain development to the high omega-3 fatty acid diet of our ancestors. With over 100 billion nerve cells in our brains and the fact that brain deterioration can set in as early as 18, it's important to keep working the grey matter!